More important for video rendering? RAM or video card?

[Kariudo]

Well first off you really can't get a much better graphics card because your motherboard doesn't have any PCIe 3.0 slots, so that means you couldn't get a GTX card and all of the GT cards aren't that big of an upgrade. Besides that what Pwolf said about storage is also very important especially when it comes to the number of disks that you have. This all has to do with Adobe products but I assume that other video editing works in a similar way, if it doesn't than someone please correct me. It is super important that you have multiple drives in your computer so that you will never be reading and writing data to the same place at the same time. You want at least 3 disks so if you currently have you entire computer stored on your C: drive then definitely go out and by 2 more drives so that you can have a D: and E: instead of more ram. I will refer to this thread a disk set up and if you don't use adobe then I would say look on your software's forums for a similar thread, http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972. If however you already have a decent disk setup then by all means buy more ram because, at least in my mind, you can never have to much ram.

PCI 3 cards are backwards compatible with PCI 2 ...

And on top of that, pci-e 3.0 doesn't do anything for the current generation of graphics cards. It's like getting an HDD with SATA 6Gbps (as opposed to an SSD). Yeah, there's more bandwidth, but an HDD just can't pull data fast enough to ever go over SATA 3.0Gbps speeds, and even the fastest non-enterprise class drives barely go over the theoretical limit for first-generation SATA.

I may be wrong, but I really doubt that getting multiple disks solely for the sake of spreading out disk load is going to help you much (if at all). Getting a second disk so you can have your media and previews on separate disks might help a little...but I'll repeat what almost everyone else has said.

RAM is the key, followed by disk transfer rates.

As for getting a new graphics card for different outputs, can your display(s) accept dvi as input? What other inputs does your monitor have?

[TheLuminaireShow]

I might consider an SSD with enough space for the OS and programs because that actually sounds pretty efficient, if it isn't terribly expensive. I see no reason NOT to upgrade my RAM considering it's still pretty cheap for the biggest increase in performance. I may forgo the video card though. My monitor has only VGA and HDMI. The HDMI goes into my TV for movies and watching videos with a group of friends, but it isn't convenient for working on videos because of the distance and I have to turn my head so much, so a second monitor would be far more useful when it comes to actually editing. I would have preferred not having to use VGA if I could help it but I'm only now realizing how superfluous a lot of this is.

[Zanzaben]

Since you currently have everything stored on one HDD I am almost certain that your disk setup is your biggest bottle neck and adding more ram or a new graphics card wouldn't seem faster since that would let adobe work with the footage really fast but it won't be able to load it into and out of it nearly as fast as your ram is letting you. Even using your external drive over a USB 2.0 connection would be better than just using one drive. As Bashar pointed out SSD's are awesome and indeed they are, however one word of warning about that is that it is important that you just put your OS and the adobe products on it and don't put any of the media, or previews, or anything else video related on it because video editing does so many more reads and writes to a disk then most other things that SSD's will often just die from being way overworked.

Regarding the video card it seems to me that you really want the additional out-puts and that will be by far the biggest factor in deciding that you want a new video card, because it will have a marginal difference on that actual video editing of your system so it depends on how much you want to be able to use DVI cables. Also keep in mind the price of the monitors that you would buy to use your new DVI connections, unless of course you have some monitors sitting around that you currently can't use in which case I would really want a new graphics card so that I could use them. I would look through the entire nivida GTX line to see which graphics card has the ports you want and any of those will be better than what you have now.

In terms of Ram it is never pointless to get more ram, even if you aren't dealing with a lot of layers of HD footage it will still be used because the way adobe works is that if there is any extra ram then it will just make more instances of it self to render more frames at once, adobe can use hundreds of gigs of ram if you had a computer that could give that much to it however your 12 GB you currently have will most likely be fine for what you are currently doing, so I would say hold off on it for now and wait until you start getting layer intensive and then by the ram then when you might need it, and instead buy another HDD or a graphics card.

[BasharOfTheAges]

This SSD is $90 ($60 after Mail-in rebate) Reviews are high but there aren't that many of them.

[Kariudo]

Since you currently have everything stored on one HDD I am almost certain that your disk setup is your biggest bottle neck and adding more ram or a new graphics card wouldn't seem faster since that would let adobe work with the footage really fast but it won't be able to load it into and out of it nearly as fast as your ram is letting you.

Again, I really doubt that the disk transfer rate is a problem that needs resolving. The background access of the OS isn't that much...so unless the OP is trying to do some i/o intensive task at the same time as previewing, this should be a non-issue.

Even using your external drive over a USB 2.0 connection would be better than just using one drive. As Bashar pointed out SSD's are awesome and indeed they are, however one word of warning about that is that it is important that you just put your OS and the adobe products on it and don't put any of the media, or previews, or anything else video related on it because video editing does so many more reads and writes to a disk then most other things that SSD's will often just die from being way overworked.

Throughput on USB 2 is around 45 MBps. Putting the media on it is sure to have much more of a negative impact than just leaving it on the internal HDD.

If transfer rates are really that much of an issue, RAID is what is needed, not just additional disks to split up the load that premiere places on i/o

Regarding the video card it seems to me that you really want the additional out-puts and that will be by far the biggest factor in deciding that you want a new video card, because it will have a marginal difference on that actual video editing of your system so it depends on how much you want to be able to use DVI cables. Also keep in mind the price of the monitors that you would buy to use your new DVI connections, unless of course you have some monitors sitting around that you currently can't use in which case I would really want a new graphics card so that I could use them. I would look through the entire nivida GTX line to see which graphics card has the ports you want and any of those will be better than what you have now.

Keep in mind that this is a pre-built pc we're talking about. The specs from HP say it's a 460W psu...but I doubt it has enough juice for almost everything that requires a 6-pin pci-e connector (or a 6-pin pci-e connector for that matter...)

Specs from HP suggest it's capable of handling a GTX 460.

Given what the OP has said, I'd just hold off on getting a graphics card. It makes little sense to get another graphics card with DVI if your display doesn't have a DVI input (and if you aren't using it for gaming.)

[Zanzaben]

Keep in mind that this is a pre-built pc we're talking about. The specs from HP say it's a 460W psu...but I doubt it has enough juice for almost everything that requires a 6-pin pci-e connector (or a 6-pin pci-e connector for that matter...)

Specs from HP suggest it's capable of handling a GTX 460.

Given what the OP has said, I'd just hold off on getting a graphics card. It makes little sense to get another graphics card with DVI if your display doesn't have a DVI input (and if you aren't using it for gaming.)

This is all very true.

In regards to Kariudo points on the whole disk setup stuff he is probably right. I have a habit of being excessive when it comes to technology and most of my knowledge comes from the adobe forms and they are often dealing with far more difficult things then you will ever deal with such as RED 4k footage so it is entirely possible that what I have been saying is a little/completely overboard.

[TEKnician]

SSD internal. Terabytes of externals (FW800 or USB 3.0) that spin 7200rpm.

Heck, even a 64 GB SSD internal is enough to store the OS and your programs.

Better yet, get a DROBO. Stack your own hard disks into a single cabinet and RAID it. You could expand the capacity by adding internal hard drives into each of the 4 sockets as needed. Cheap storage that grows.

[TheLuminaireShow]

Thank you for everyone's input! I agree that I should forgo the graphics card. I'm interested in this SSD and I DID install a USB 3.0 just so people know. What's the transfer rate of that if I get a compatible HDD? However currently I'm thinking of possibly getting that SSD and the RAM and that's under $200 even! That sounds like a nice improvement. How exactly do you RAID something though?

[BasharOfTheAges]

I DID install a USB 3.0 just so people know. What's the transfer rate of that if I get a compatible HDD?

4Gbit/sec theoretical max. Real world speeds would be closer to around 400MB/sec. This is actually faster than the internal USB to SATA connector inside any external HDD is going to be anyways.

[Kariudo]

There are plenty of videos on youtube on how to set up RAID. This one is done by a guy on overclock3d.net, which I used to frequent.

If you can't do the things laid out in that video, then you'd have to buy a raid card like this or like this.